Life Between Death and Rebirth

Schmidt Number: S-2691

On-line since: 27th October, 2004

IX

Life After Death

Linz, January 26, 1913

What are
our aims when we gather for spiritual-scientific studies? Many ask
this question because those who are connected with spiritual science
devote a part of their forces to considerations that for others
actually do not come into question today. Truly, we consider realms
that for the majority of people simply do not exist. Yet the
gathering for such work is not merely the pursuit of an “ideal”
in the sense of other ideals that are prevalent in our time.

The spiritual-scientific “ideal” is different in that it
seeks to answer the call, which in our time is perhaps only heard
faintly and by a few but which will become more and more audible in
the world. Today there are some who are able to say clearly that
spiritual science is a necessity and others do so out of
indeterminate feeling. But out of what depths of the soul does this
arise? Surely the one follows more or less what may be termed a
spiritual instinct, an urge, that he is quite unable to bring to full
consciousness. Yet such an urge corresponds to a rightly directed
will. This may be observed when we investigate the soul life.

It is my intention on this occasion not to unfold general theories
but to deal with actual instances. This is especially necessary if we
wish to answer the above question.

The seer who is able to look into the spiritual worlds also gradually
gains an insight into the life between death and rebirth. This
existence takes place in spiritual realms that are continually
surrounding us, to which we belong with the best part of our soul
life. Man lives purely in the spiritual world when he has gone
through the gate of death and has laid aside his physical body. As
long as he makes use of the physical senses and the intellect, the
spiritual world remains hidden from him. The seer, however, can
follow the different stages of life between death and rebirth.

The basic questions, which are important in relation to our ideals,
do in fact stem from a consideration of life between death and a new
birth. One might easily suppose that that life has nothing whatever
to do with our life here on the physical plane, but in a deeper sense
they are closely related. We become especially aware of this when we
look at a soul that has gone through the gate of death. Let us take
an actual instance and consider the relationship of such a soul to
those who are still in a physical body.

A man went through the gate of death and left his wife and children
behind. After a certain period had elapsed, it was possible for one
able to look into the spiritual worlds to find this soul and a
painful existence was revealed. The soul lamented the loss of wife
and children. This expressed itself approximately in the following
words, but we should remember that the earthly words used to express
what a soul seeks to convey are only an approximation and are similar
to a garment. One naturally cannot convey the language of the dead by
means of earthly words. It is different and one has to translate it.

So this soul lamented, “I used to live with those whom I have
left behind. Previously when I dwelt in a physical body and would
come home in the evening after I had done my work, I would join them,
and what shone from their souls was like the light of the sun.
Everything that I experienced in their company used to alleviate the
burden of physical existence. I was then quite unable to imagine life
in the physical world without my wife and children. I am able to
recall our life together as it used to be in every detail. But when I
awoke in the spiritual world after death, I was unable to find my
wife and children. For me they are not there. Only memories remain. I
know that they are below on the earth, but their soul life as it is
taking place in thinking, feeling and willing from morning until
night is as if extinguished. I am unable to find my loved ones
however hard I try.”

This is a genuine experience, and it is shared by many souls who
cross the gate of death in our present time. It was not always so in
the evolution of humanity. In ancient times it was different. Men
crossed the threshold of death in another way but they also were not
in their physical bodies on earth as they are today.

The difference lies in the fact that in earlier times man still
possessed a spiritual heritage by means of which he was linked to the
spiritual world. The farther back we go in ancient periods when souls
who are incarnate today were already present on the earth, the more
we discover that man then was rightly connected to the spiritual
world. Man has lost increasingly the old spiritual inheritance, and
today we live in a period when there is a radical change in the
evolution of humanity.

Let us clarify this point before embarking on the profound facts
previously described. In our time there are people who know little
more about the starry heavens, for instance, than what is common
knowledge today. True, there are still some who go out on a clear
night and delight in the grandeur and glory of the starry heavens,
but such people are in a minority. There are more and more people who
are unable to distinguish between a planet and a fixed starry but
that is not the most important thing. Even when people do go out to
look up to the heavens, they only see stars externally in their
physical appearance. This was not the case in ancient times. It was
not so for souls who are here today but who in ancient times dwelt in
other bodies. The same souls who now see only the physical stars
formerly beheld, when they contemplated the starry heavens, not so
much the physical light of the stars but what was spiritually
connected with them. Spiritual beings are connected with all the
stars. What we term the higher hierarchies in spiritual science today
were seen clairvoyantly by the souls of primeval times — by all
of you here and by all the people outside. Man then did not merely
see the physical world but he also beheld the spiritual world. It
would have been sheer foolishness in those times to deny the
spiritual world, as much as if today a person would deny the
existence of roses and lilies. The spiritual world could not be
denied because it was perceived. That man has lost the immediate
connection with the spiritual world marks, in a certain sense, a step
forward. In its place he has gained a greater degree of independence
and freedom.

In former times the human soul lived in an external spiritual world.
This realm gradually has been lost but the loss has to be replaced
from within. Therefore, today the soul that relies merely on the
perception of the outer world feels barren and empty. How many souls
are there in our time who go about in the world totally oblivious of
the fact that all space is filled by the presence of spiritual
beings! One nevertheless can gain an understanding of the content of
the spiritual by beholding the external world only. This is possible
by penetrating into the depth of the soul. Many people, however, are
not willing to do so, including the family of whom I spoke to your
earlier.

The man in question dwelt in the spiritual world, in the realm in
which we live between death and rebirth. He longed to be reunited
with the souls with whom he had lived on earth, but for him they were
not existent. Why? Because the souls who remained behind on the earth
did not seek a spiritual content, because they were only able to
manifest their presence by way of a physical body. He longed to know
something of these souls who formerly had been to him as rays of
sunshine, and the seer who was acquainted with him before he passed
through the gate of death was not even able to comfort him in any
special way. For comfort such as the following would have been
fundamentally dishonest. “The souls that are extinguished for
you will join you later if you have but the patience to wait. Then
you will have them again as they were on earth.” That would not
have been quite true, because these souls were far removed from any
form of penetration into spiritual life. They, too, after they have
gone through the gate of death will have a fearful longing to be
united with those whom they knew on earth. Souls who are devoid of
any form of spiritual life encounter many obstacles.

We have reached the stage in the cycle of evolution of mankind when
souls dwelling in a physical body must learn the language of the
spirit. We must acquire a knowledge of higher worlds here. Many souls
in our time despise a knowledge that may be termed theosophy in the
literal sense of the word. This is truly the language that we must be
able to speak after death if we wish to be rightly there for the
spiritual world. After death we cannot make up for what we should
have learned as the language of theosophy or spiritual science.

If the man I referred to had occupied himself with spiritual science
together with his family, he would have had quite other experiences,
another form of consciousness after death. In fact, he would have
known that souls can be experienced there. Even is he was separated
from them by a gulf they would one day join him. They would be able
to find each other because they shared a common spiritual language.
Otherwise he would not be reunited with them as one rightly should be
after death. He would only encounter them as one meets people on
earth who are dumb, who want to convey something but are quite
incapable of doing so.

Truly it must be admitted that such facts are uncomfortable, and many
of our contemporaries do not find them to their liking, but it is the
truth that matters, not whether they sound pleasant or not.

In earlier periods of human evolution souls received much because
they were still in their infancy and accepted religious traditions
and ideas about the spiritual world in a childlike manner. As a
result, they possessed a language for the spiritual life and were
able to live in communion with spiritual beings. Now man is called
upon, particularly in our age, to become ever more independent in his
relation to spiritual life.

Spiritual science has not come into the world in an arbitrary way. It
cannot be propagated by the means usually available and is commonly
the practice of societies that seek to spread their particular aims.

Those who feel called upon to carry spiritual ideas into our
contemporary cultural life have experienced the painful cry of souls
after death who are unable to find the ones they have left behind
because spiritually they are empty. The cry of the dead is the call
that brings forth the ideal of spiritual science.

One who is able to experience by entering into the spiritual world
the agony, the longing, the renunciation, but also the hopelessness
that fills the souls who have passed through the gate of death, knows
the reason for our gatherings. He also knows that he cannot do
otherwise than to represent this spiritual life. This is a matter of
the greatest seriousness and it is called forth by the deepest
longing of humanity.

Today there are souls who feel, even if out of the deepest recesses
of their instincts that they wish to experience something of the
spiritual world! They are the pioneers of a future when souls will
come who will consider it important to cultivate a spiritual life
founded on the cognition of the spiritual worlds. Spiritual life must
be cultivated on earth in the sense of the new spiritual science,
because otherwise humanity will increasingly enter into the other
world spiritually dumb, lacking the capacity to open itself rightly.

It is also a fallacy to believe that we can wait until we have
crossed the threshold of death to experience something of a spiritual
nature over there. In order to experience anything of this kind one
must have attained the faculty to perceive. But this faculty cannot
be developed after death unless one has first acquired it here on
earth. We do not live in vain in the material world! It is not for
nothing that our souls descend to the physical world. They descend so
that we may acquire what actually can only be acquired here, namely,
spiritual cognition.

We cannot regard the earth as a mere vale of despair into which our
souls are transposed, so to speak. We should consider the earth as a
place by means of which we can acquire the possibility of developing
spiritually. This is the truth of it.

If we question the seer further regarding the nature of life after
death, he will reply that it is quite different from the course of
life on earth. Here we travel across the world; we see the heavenly
vault spread out above us, the sun that is shining. We look out and
see the mountains, the lakes, the creatures of the various kingdoms
of nature. We go through the world and carry our thoughts,
sensations, passions, desires within us. Then we pass through the
gate of death, but here things are different. For those unfamiliar
with spiritual scientific observations, it all appears most
paradoxical. What Schopenhauer said is correct, that “poor
truth” must bear the fact that it is paradoxical.

The thoughts and mental images that we regard as belonging to an
inner realm appear to us after death as our external world. After
death all our thoughts and mental representations appear as a mighty
panorama before the soul. People who go through life thoughtlessly
travel through the world between death and rebirth in such a way that
what should be experienced as filled with wisdom and thought content
appears to them as empty and barren. Only they feel filled with a
content between death and a new birth who have acquired the faculty
to behold the thoughts spread out in the starry realms. One acquires
this faculty between birth and death by evolving a thought content
within the soul.

If we have not filled our soul here on earth with what the physical
senses can give us, it is as if we were to journey along the path
from death to rebirth like one who has no ears and therefore cannot
hear a sound, like the one who has no eyes and cannot perceive a
single color. The sun in the heavens illuminates everything, but when
it sets the surroundings, disappear from our view. Likewise, things
that are external in life appear after death as an inner world.

Let us consider what is yet another real experience to the seer. When
we contemplate people who live between death and rebirth and seek to
translate into our language what torments them, they tell us the
following. “Something lives in me that causes me to suffer. It
rises up out of my own self. It is akin to a headache in the physical
world, except that the pain is experienced inwardly. I am myself the
one who causes the pain.” A human being after death may
complain of much inner pain, inner suffering.

Now if the seer traces the origin of the inner suffering that strikes
souls after death, he discovers that it comes from the way of life of
these people here on earth. Suppose a person has felt a quite
unjustifiable loathing for a fellow human being. Then the one who
hated experiences inner pain after death, and he now suffers inwardly
what he has inflicted on the other.

Whereas our thinking enables us to behold an outer world after death,
so what we experience on earth as our external moral world, as the
feeling relationships to other people, becomes our inner world after
death. Indeed, it sounds grotesque and yet it is true that just as
here we can feel a pain in our lungs, our stomach or our head, so
after death a moral injustice can hurt. What is inner here is
external there, and what is external here is inner there. We have
reached the stage in the development of humanity when much can be
experienced only after death.

A person who is not prepared to admit the reality of karma, or
repeated earth lives, can never really accept the fact that a destiny
belongs to him. How does a person go through the world? One person
does this to him, the other that; he likes the one, dislikes the
other. He does not know that he himself is the cause of what comes to
meet him, of the painful experience inflicted by another person. This
does not occur to him, for otherwise he would feel, “You have
brought it on yourself!”

If during one's lifetime one is able to entertain such
thoughts, then one at least will have a feeling as to the origin of
the suffering one has to endure after death.

To know about karma in life between death and rebirth alleviates the
pain, for otherwise the agonizing question as to why one has to
suffer remains unanswered. In our time we have to begin to be aware
of such things for without knowledge of them the evolution of
humanity will not be able to continue.

Another instance is revealed to the seer. There are people who,
between death and rebirth, are made to fulfill most unpleasant tasks.
We should not imagine that we have nothing to do between death and a
new birth. We have to accomplish the move varied tasks according to
our individual capabilities. The seer finds, for instance, that there
are souls who are forced to serve a being such as Ahriman after
death.

As soon as we enter the realm beyond the physical, Ahriman appears
quite clearly to us as a special being. Everything that has been
portrayed as the domain of Ahriman and Lucifer in the drama,
The Guardian of the Threshold,
is real. Ahriman has a number of tasks
to perform. The seer discovers souls who are appointed in the realm
of Ahriman and have to serve that being. Why have they been condemned
to serve Ahriman? The seer investigates how such people lived between
birth and death, considers the principal characteristics of such
souls and discovers that they all suffered from one common evil, the
love of ease. Love of ease and comfort are among the most widespread
characteristics of contemporary humanity.

If we should inquire the reason that most people fail to do
something, the answer invariably is, love of ease! Whether we turn
our attention to the most important things of life or to mere
trifles, love of ease permeates them all. To hold onto the old, not
being able to shake it off, is a form of ease. In this respect people
are not as bad as one is inclined to believe. It was not out of bad
will that Giordano Bruno and Savanarola were burned at the stake or
that Galileo was maltreated as he was. It is also not out of badness
that great spirits are not appreciated during their lifetime, but
rather out of love of ease! A long time has to elapse before people
are able to think and feel along new lines, and it is only because of
a love of ease! Love of ease and comfort are widespread
characteristics, and it makes it possible to be enlisted after death
into the ranks of Ahriman, for Ahriman, apart from his other
functions, is the spirit of obstacles. Wherever obstacles arise
Ahriman is master. He applies the brakes to life and to human beings.

Those who are subject to love of ease on earth will become agents to
the slowing down process of everything that comes into the world from
the super-sensible. So love of ease fetters human souls between death
and rebirth to spirits who, under Ahriman, are compelled to serve the
powers of opposition and hindrance.

In many people we find a propensity that in everyday life we denote
as an immoral characteristic, and that is lack of conscience. In the
voice of conscience we have a wonderful regulator for the soul life.
A lack of conscience, the inability to listen to the warning voice of
conscience, delivers us to yet other powers between the period of
death and a new birth. The seer discovers souls who have become the
servants of particularly evil spirit-beings after death.

Here on earth illnesses occur, and they arise in a number of
different ways. We know, for instance, that in olden times epidemic
sicknesses such as plague and cholera swept Europe. Materialistic
science is able to point to the external causes but it cannot grasp
the inner spiritual origin. Yet everything that happens has a
spiritual foundation. If someone should say that science has the task
to discover the physical causes of happenings, then one can always
add that spiritual science does not exclude the reality of outer
causes when they are justified. Spiritual science supplies the
spiritual causes to the phenomena.

A person once asked the following question in connection with
spiritual causes. “Can we not explain Napoleon's
passionate fondness for conducting battles by the fact that when his
mother carried him she would often go for walks over battle fields?
Is this not a case of physical heredity?” There is something in
this, but Napoleon found his way to his mother; he implanted this
liking in her.

For instance, someone might say, “Here is a man. Why does he
live?” The materialistic might reply, “Because he
breathes.” Another might respond, “But I know better. He
would not be alive today if I had not pulled him out of the water
three months ago!” Yet is this last statement not correct in
spite of the first? One all too readily imagines that the findings of
natural science are repudiated by spiritual science. Even if it is
possible to show that a person owed this or that faculty to his
father and grandfather by way of heredity, it is nonetheless true
that he himself has created the appropriate conditions.

Thus it is possible to study the causes of illnesses on a purely
scientific basis. One can also ask the question quite externally of
why has this or that person died young. But this, too, has its source
in the spiritual world. In order that illnesses manifest themselves
on earth, certain spiritual entities must direct them from the
spiritual into the physical world.

The spiritual investigator is confronted by a shattering experience
when he turns his spiritual gaze to souls who have died prematurely
in the flower of youth, either as a result of illness, misfortune or
hardships during their lifetimes. There are many such destinies. The
seer beholds a vast expanse of illness and death wholly governed by
certain evil spirits who bring disease and death down to the earth.
If one now seeks to trace the course of existence of those souls who
lacked conscience on earth, one finds that they were forced to become
the servants of the evil spirits of death, disease and hindrance who
bring about premature deaths and great misfortune. That is the
connection.

Life only becomes comprehensible when one considers the total
picture, not merely the small segment between birth and death. For
this period is again closely related to what took place during the
unborn condition, during the prenatal existence in the pure spiritual
world. Our whole being is dependent on what occurred previously in
the spirit-world. This can be understood most readily if one studies
a phenomenon by means of super-sensible cognition that might appear to
many as an objection to spiritual investigation as such.

There are people who say, “You seek to trace faculties and
destinies of human beings to previous earth lives, but consider the
Bernoulli family in whom there were eight mathematicians! Surely that
shows clearly that certain faculties are passed from generation to
generation by way of heredity.”

If, however, such a phenomenon is carefully studied by means of
super-sensible cognition, the following result is reached. Everything
that manifests itself on earth in this or that artistic form, that
permeates the human being with a sense for the spiritual — and
art always does this — has its origin in the super-sensible
world. A person who brings artistic gifts into the world does so
because of previous earth lives, or by virtue of a special act of
grace during the period before birth, before conception, when he
lived in a special manner in the realm of the harmony of the spheres.
Now he manifests a certain affinity towards that physical body
able to provide the faculty he has perceived and thus bring it to
expression in earthly life.

No soul would seek to incarnate in a body in such a family where
musical gifts are in the hereditary stream unless he had acquired in
a previous earth life the very faculties needed for that art, unless
he had passed through the period between death and rebirth in order
to be reborn in a musical body. For only the most primitive
predispositions can be found in the hereditary stream. A good musical
ear is inherited. The organs are transformed according to the
particular faculties of the soul during the embryonic period or after
birth. The first instrument on which man plays is his own organism,
and this is truly a most complex instrument. Divine spiritual beings
have needed the whole of the Saturn, Sun and Moon periods of
evolution in order to fashion this instrument. We come into the world
with a wisdom that far exceeds what we are able to acquire later.

Man imagines that he has reached a considerable degree of wisdom when
he begins to be able to think. But the wisdom we develop when we
begin to think is in fact far smaller in comparison to the great
wisdom that we acquired but lost at a particular time. At birth our
brain is still soft. The connecting links that go from the brain to
the several organs are still undeveloped, and we are endowed with
wisdom during childhood in order to “plan-in” the organs,
the instrument.

The moment to which we look back as the first occasion on which we
were conscious of ourselves marks the time when we lost the faculty
to play on our instrument. This ability is much greater in early
childhood than later on. A profound wisdom is utilized in order to
bring us to the point at which we become this intricate instrument.
This fact can permeate us with a deep sense of admiration for what we
are as long as we rest within the womb of divine spiritual wisdom.
Then we become aware that we actually come into life with a much
greater wisdom than is normally realized. Then we can also picture
the vastness of the wisdom that surrounds us in our existence that
precedes the embryonic stage. This is of the utmost significance, for
initiate consciousness perceives that the farther back we go the
greater the wisdom and ability of man.

Now let us consider with super-sensible perception the soul of an
individual who has become the servant of an evil spirit of disease
and death. Such a soul enables us to see how the wisdom of which man
is capable has been extinguished, how he has lowered himself. Such a
soul offers a terrifying aspect. Once destined to develop the
loftiest wisdom, he is now so degraded that he has become the servant
of ahrimanic beings! Man has the alternative during an incarnation
when he has surrounded himself with a physical body either to receive
the spiritual world into himself, to participate in spiritual life,
to animate his soul so that after death he experiences the spiritual
world around him, or to dull himself. Such souls have dulled
themselves because they failed to receive between birth and death
what would have enabled them to perceive a spiritual world around
them.

Thus we see how individual souls are connected with the spiritual
life of the world as a whole. Thus we see ourselves membered in the
totality of life on earth. So also we understand the importance of
not letting our innate spirit-powers wither, but of cultivating them
lest we gradually be obliterated from the world. A person could
maintain, however, that he wants to obliterate himself from the
surrounding world because to him life is meaningless. To extinguish
oneself in this way is not destruction. It merely represents an
extinguishing of oneself in relation to the surrounding world.
Although one is nevertheless there for oneself. To extinguish oneself
in the world means to be condemned to loneliness in the spiritual
world. It is as if one lived in utter solitude, cut off, robbed of
any means of communication. This is what one achieves if one excludes
oneself from the spiritual world.

You may well make use of the following picture. Let it impress itself
upon you for it can be considered as a sound basis for meditation.

The more a person advances in the evolution of the world, the freer
he becomes. He will live more and more as if on an island and his
calls, his understanding must go from island to island. Human beings
who seek to partake of the future of the spiritual life of humanity
will be able to understand one another, that is, those who live in
freedom on other islands. Those, on the other hand, who flee the
spiritual life will find themselves on their own individual islands,
and when they seek to communicate with those whom they knew
previously, they will be unable to do so. The voice that calls will
be stifled in them. Each will sense, “Over there on those
islands are those whom I know, with whom I am connected.” But
nothing will penetrate to him and he will listen but hear nothing.

Spiritual science provides the language that in the future will
enable men to gain the possibility to bridge the gap of loneliness
and reach an understanding. The utterances that come to us out of
occult writings are often more profound than we imagine. When the
Mystery of Golgotha took place, humanity received the first
proclamation that man needs in order to reach an understanding from
one island to the other.

The second proclamation is by way of anthroposophical spiritual
science, which seeks to clarify ever more the Christ mystery for the
soul of man. The actual words of Christ are indicated in many of his
sayings. Among the most profound of them all is, “When two are
gathered in my name, I will be among them.” One will learn to
understand this Name only when one masters the language of the
spirit.

In the early phase of the Christian proclamation one still found it
in a naïve manner. In the future only those human souls will
know the Christ who recognize Him by way of spiritual science.

To many peoples it may appear ridiculous that spiritual science is
termed the spiritual language that humanity needs so that people will
not be isolated after death, but will find the possibility of
traveling from one island to the other.

The subject with which we have dealt today will give you the reason
why we gather in order to cultivate spiritual science. He who works
consciously for spiritual science follows that call, that voice. He
also follows it who merely feels a longing to hear something about
the spiritual world. These voices, these calls come from the
spiritual world, and so does the need that is experienced in the
spiritual world when those who dwell between death and a new birth
are heard. And the voices of the various hierarchical beings can also
be heard.

These voices as they sound forth towards us will awaken in our souls
what will lead humanity to cultivate increasingly the spiritual life
that is also nurtured in our groups. May it also continue to be
cultivated faithfully here.

That is the wish that I could like to express to you at the end of
these considerations, and it is my deepest hope that it may grow ever
stronger, kindling your souls so that the work of spiritual science
may take fire and be carried forward out of true anthroposophical
warmth.